An image of the Supergiant Shell LMC-4 in
the Large Magellanic Cloud, taken with the
Curtis Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Observatory (CTIO) as part of the Magellanic
Clouds Emission Line Survey (MCELS).

Chandra's
image of N63A shows material heated to about
ten million degrees Celsius by a shock wave
generated by the supernova explosion. The
fluffy crescent-shaped X-ray features that
appear around the edge of the remnant are
thought to be fragments of high-speed matter
shot out from the star when it exploded, like
shrapnel from a bomb. The colors red, green
and blue in the image correspond to low, medium
and high-energy X-rays, respectively.

Credit: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Warren et al.

N 63A: Chandra and
Hubble

X-rays from Chandra
(blue), combined with optical (green) and
radio (red) data, reveal new details in LMC
N 63A. The X-ray glow is from material heated
by a shock wave generated by the supernova
explosion. The age of the remnant is estimated
to be in the range of 2,000 to 5,000 years.Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Warren
et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI/U. Ill/Y.Chu;
Radio: ATCA/U. Ill/J.Dickel et al.

The Hubble Space Telescope's
Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) was
used to obtain images of a violent and chaotic-looking
mass of gas and dust known as N 63A. The dissolve
sequence builds from a Spitzer telescope infrared
image of the area, adding the Chandra X-ray
image, and the Hubble visible-light images,
which dissolves to the Hubble composite of
the beautiful supernova remnant.